FREAKS, GEEKS & STRANGE GIRLS Sideshow Banners of the Great American Midway
by Randy Johnson, Jim Secreto, and Teddy Varndell, Hardy Marks Publications, 169 pages.
A burly and wholly American folk art draws a passionate tribute in this extraordinarily handsome book of the painted banners that throughout this century have drawn the prurient to see MAJOR DEBERT TINIEST MAN, SWEET MARIE 643 LBS, ALLIGATOR GIRL, TURKEY BOY, EEKA AND THE GIANT SNAKES, DICKIE THE PENGUIN BOY, and 5 LEGGED COW. The earliest examples here date from around 1910, and this highly succinct art form, which learned to do its job efficiently at about the time of the First World War, has evidently not felt the need of evolution.
The banners are coarse, vigorous, sometimes disquieting, sometimes funny, sometimes strangely beautiful. Vintage photographs show them at work from the 1920s (WORLD’S SMALLEST CHARLESTON DANCERS) through the 1970s (IS IT ROSEMARY’S BABY?), and the veteran banner painter Johnny Meah talks about his calling: “I’ve pictorialized numerous alligator skinned people. In rendering them one must constantly bear in mind that the banner will be viewed from many feet away, therefore very bold lines and exaggerated light and dark contrast must be used in depicting the unusual skin. As is the case with most banner art, you constantly repress the urge to use softer, more subtle effects as they are lost when viewed from a distance.”
RECORDING
A March Craze
THE ‘WASHINGTON POST & OTHER AMERICAN NEWSPAPER MARCHES
The Advocate Brass Band, George Foreman, director,Gazebo Records .
When John Philip Sousa wrote the “Washington Post March” in 1889 for a ceremony announcing the winners of a student essay contest, he started a craze. It was the age when the center of every town green was its bandstand, and when tobacco companies gave away newspaper-editors cards like baseball cards. Arthur Pryor, the “Paganini of the trombone,” soon penned “The St. Louis Post-Dispatch March”; the noted trombonist Frederick Innes created marches for papers in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, New York, and Washington—one-third of his entire musical output; Alessandro Liberati wrote the “Kansas City Star March,” which served as the daily sign-on music for the paper’s radio station until 1958. The fad was not brief: The Louisville Courier-journal got its march in 1961. Altogether, more than a hundred newspaper marches were written. Eighteen of them, all top-notch rousers, are expertly performed on this CD by a band formed in 1987 by the Danville, Kentucky, Advocate-Messenger to reincarnate a turn-of-the-century town band.
The Marlowe Stories
CHANDLER (VOLUME I) Stories & Early Novels
Library of America,1,199 pages.
CHANDLER (VOLUME II) Later Novels & Other Writings
Library of America,1,076 pages.
When a critic called his fictional hero Philip Marlowe an amoral “zombie” in 1949, Raymond Chandler wrote him: “Marlowe is a more honorable man than you or I. … I’ve seen dozens like him in all essentials except the few colorful qualities he needed to be in a book. (A few even had those.)” Slightly darker than the deadpan Hollywood dramas they inspired, Chandler’s crime novels and stories cast a leery but romantic eye over Los Angeles’s rich enclaves and the surrounding desert towns.
The early stories are filled with themes and riffs he would sustain longer in the novels. Urban weariness amid Edenic California (“Beautiful hands are as rare as jacaranda trees in bloom, in a city where pretty faces are as common as runs in dollar stockings”); the Eve-like women his heroes always distrust, fall for, and regret; quick, unsentimental talk (“You’re a good stoolie, Joey. I’ll always say that for you”)—they are all there in the early pulp stuff of Volume I. Philip Marlowe takes up the case in The Big Sleep (1939) and soldiers through Farewell, My Lovely, The High Window, The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, and the final Playback (1958). His fictional odyssey has awed American detective writers since. These slangy classics, brought together by the Library of America with the stories, essays, letters, and screenplay for Double Indemnity, create our quintessential picture of Los Angeles: “Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. … A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.”
Melting Pot Luck
THE ELLIS ISLAND IMMIGRANT COOKBOOK The Story of Our Common Past Told Through the Recipes and Reminiscences of Our Immigrant Ancestors
by Tom Bernardin,self-published, 254 pages.
Tom Bernardin took a job as a tour guide at Ellis Island in the late 1970s and was so affected by the history of its then-shabby buildings and the reverence of its thousands of visitors that before the island was closed for renovations, he quit and took his own slide-and-lecture show on the road. This project led him to advertise a national search for Ellis Island immigrant recipes, and the results fill this lovely book. Along with a family recipe for Puddle Jelly came Hallie Morrison Block’s story about her grandparents’ arrival from Romania and their “enduring, but not especially happy” marriage, redeemed for Block by the memory of her grandmother “stretching tissue-paper-thin Strudel dough over a long table.” The DePauw family recipe for the Belgian Etsaput (All in the Pot) comes with a story about how Charles DePauw arrived, found American women unsatisfactory, and wrote home to a girl he remembered. The younger sister answered him, explaining that the one he wanted had married but that “she had not found a spouse herself,” writes their daughter, Rachelle.
Bernardin realized in assembling this cookbook that the old country’s food can often be its most evocative and stubbornest tradition. The foods are organized by country of origin, and the book also contains a good history of Ellis Island and “Tips on Tracing Your Family Roots” and on “Preserving a Family Recipe.”
Great War Reference
THE UNITED STATES IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR
An Encyclopedia,edited by Anne Cipriano Venzon,Garland Publishing, 830 pages.
America’s part in the great war fills this first-rate encyclopedia written by more than 230 scholars of the conflict. Through its disparate entries on subjects like the pacifist Jane Addams, the Camp MacArthur riot, slacker raids, and the different treatments for the emerging malady of “shell shock”—rest, cold douches, talking cures, and electric shock—the book remains authoritative and literate. Its authors are as confident explaining domestic cultural and economic changes as they are detailing the birth of aerial warfare or the nuances of the Otranto mine barrage. A section on wartime music traces American attitudes through popular song, from the neutralist “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” to “Let’s All Be Americans Now.” Gary P. Cox’s essay on trenches is a grimly thorough history from the Middle Ages through the ghastly massive deadlock on the Western Front. The Americans missed several bitter years of the trench war and so arrived with a fresh take. No one was more out of his element in the conflict than Alvin C. York, the deeply Christian Tennessean who had his conscientious-objector application turned down but emerged from the Argonne Forest at war’s end marching 132 German prisoners ahead of him. America’s months in the World War changed the nation utterly in ways this book does its best to detail.
Desert Bloom
LITERARY LAS VEGAS The Best Writing About America’s Most Fabulous City
edited by Mike Tromes,Henry Holt, 358 pages.
Whether they made the trip to Las Vegas expecting Paradise or a war zone, not one of the twenty-six writers in this collection failed to be mesmerized by Bugsy Siegel’s gaudy oasis. In the fifty years since ground was broken for Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel (and Vegas itself), the mobster’s resort has grown into a corporate-owned vacation center; kids fill hotel pools once reserved for call girls. This volume contains Tom Wolfe’s 1964 portrait of the place, a big chunk of Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and surprising pieces by A. J. Liebling, Alan Richman, and Michael Herr, who feels the city reached a cultural peak in the early sixties when Sinatra and his Rat Pack friends ruled the Strip. The English writer A. Alvarez focuses minutely on the contestants in the World Series of Poker, drawing out gamblers’ stories that are both cautionary and inspiring. Joan Didion takes on another native industry—the Vegas quickie wedding; Susan Herman brings the town back to its roots with her “Memoirs of a Gangster’s Daughter.” Literary Las Vegas catches all the lurid colors of the town.
VIDEO
Was It Mutiny?
THE CURSE OF THE ‘SOMERS’ Billy Budd’s Ghost Ship
a film by George Belcher,Somers Documentary Film Project, 55 minutes.
Pursuing a Mexican blockade-runner off Veracruz in 1846, the U.S. brig-of-war Somers sailed straight into a gale and sank. It was lost for a century and half until an expedition led by George and Joel Belcher tracked it down in 1986. Their subsequent venture with the Mexican government found cannon still loaded and skylight glass intact from the officers’ mess. But their discovery also gave new life to the ship’s scandalous legends, reviving a debate over its “mutiny” of 1842. The alleged plot, for which the Secretary of War’s son, Philip Spencer, was executed at sea along with two others, was in effect a pretext for murder, according to the naval historian Edward L. Beach. During the first six months of the voyage, the Somers’s commander, Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, ordered a total of 2,265 lashes with the “cat” on a crew largely of teenage boys. In December 1842 the eighteen-year-old Spencer was hanged—raised to strangle from the yardarm, not dropped—for mutinous remarks made to a fellow sailor. The alleged mutiny (the American Navy’s first) and hangings became such a scandal that following Mackenzie’s court-martial and bare acquittal, the U.S. Naval Academy was founded.
There the story ended until the ex-seaman Herman Melville read a newspaper account years later and was inspired to write his masterful last novel, Billy Budd, about a young sailor hanged by his commander. This film begins with the brig’s sinking and moves briskly along through its history and the clues that led the Belchers to pinpoint the wreck site (a detail on an old Spanish map, a survivor’s naval testimony). It is history brought up from the ocean floor.
IN THIS ISSUE
American Heritage’s debut on CD-ROM mentioned in “Letter From the Editor,” American Heritage: The Civil War—The Complete Multimedia Experience, is available from Byron Preiss Multimedia and Simon & Schuster Interactive (two CD-ROMs, for Windows or Macintosh. For all its period music, appearances by the Civil War historians James M. McPherson and Douglas Brinkley, and instructive strategy game, the package has its grounding in the work of our late editor Bruce Catton, whose classic history batted out on sheets of yellow typescript now joins the computer age.
In between his visits to America—recalled with such feeling in our pages—the English military historian John Keegan has written a number of esteemed books on armed conflicts, including his History of Warfare (Knopf, 480 pages).
Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism, which provides the background for much of his conversation with Nicholas Lemann, is published by the Free Press (724 pages).
